Tristan’s quest for glory on the cards

A St Annes video producer has played his cards right to fund a fantasy – the launch of his own tabletop game.

Former St Bede’s student Tristan Hall has produced Gloom of Kilforth a dark gothic adventure card game featuring more than 300 detailed pieces of artwork.

I blogged about the idea on an online forum and got really positive feedback. People kept asking where could they get this game

It had been an ambition of his since his student days, ten years in the making and is now ready for launch after a successful online crowdfunding campaign.

In fact, demand for the game was so high among the fantasy gaming community, that the Kickstarter fundraising achieved 150 per cent of its original target.

And more than 2,000 copies of the game have already been ordered leaving less than 500 of the original production left before it officially goes on sale.

Tristan, who has worked on shows such as Life on Mars and Shameless as a former in-house editor at The Sound House Manchester, said: “It stems from playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons as a teenager, but I have been working on its production seriously for the past two years.

“I blogged about the idea on an online forum and got really positive feedback. People kept asking where could they get this game.

“I had sold the rights to a publisher but they were dragging their feet and so I got the rights back to do it myself.

“I advertised for an artist and luckily found Ania Kryczkowska from Poland. Her art work was so far above anyone else’s it is amazing.”

Copies of the game are now on their way from China ahead of its official launch next month.

He said: “I launched the crowdfunding campaign and we hit £8,000 on the first day.

“It went slowly after that but once we reached our target, loads more flooded in.

“It has been re-invested in the game to give extra cards and adventures and improve the quality to make a real opening statement.

“Hopefully it is going to go toe to toe with the well known similar games such as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.”

Tristan said inspiration came from the hugely popular fantasy genre spawned by JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings novels.

He described the game as semi-complex but playable by one to four people and taking between an hour and four hours depending on the number of players.

He said each person chooses a character and follows a series of storylines leading up to the end quest to defeat an ancient evil threatening to engulf Kilforth.

Each time you play is different, he said, with a great variety of characters, enemies and story lines to maximise re-payability.

But if high fantasy is not your thing, Tristan is already working on his next game rooted firmly in British history set at the time of the Battle of Hastings.

He added: “We are well under way with the new game which is called 1066, Tears To Many Mothers, and will be starting the crowdfunding campaing next month.”